[Skyler’s POV]
The medical reports are my excuse. Four pages, single-spaced, the weekly clinic summary I could have left with his assistant or slid under the door. But Dr. Vasquez asked me to hand-deliver them, and I am a professional who follows instructions.
None of this has anything to do with the fact that Leon's office smells like cedar and something underneath it my lungs have been memorizing without consent. He's behind his desk when I knock—sleeves rolled to the elbow, reading glasses perched on his nose. "Come in."
"Weekly clinic reports." I set the pages on the edge of his desk with crisp efficiency. Performed good enough to fool anyone into thinking that I have never once thought about his forearms. "Immunization updates, border patrol injury log, supply request for next month."
He pulls the glasses off and scans the first page. "The supply numbers are up."
"Eight sparring injuries last week and a seven-year-old who decided to test whether he could outrun a bee." I cross my arms. "He could not."
The corner of his mouth lifts—barely, a twitch he probably doesn't register—and I study the bookshelf because the alternative is mapping exactly how his face changes when he's amused.
"Ashton landed a combination yesterday." He says it without looking up, pen tracing a margin note. "Left-right-left, clean rotation. Morrison said it was the best sequence from any trainee under twelve."
My arms loosen before I can stop them. "He's been practicing on a pillow in our room. River times him with the kitchen clock."
"She mentioned that." Leon flips to the second page. "She also told me she's going to be a healer when she grows up." His pen stills and the rest arrives unhurried, shaped with a care that tells me the words have been sitting in his mouth for a while. "Just like her mama."
My hands go still on the desk's edge.
He said ‘mama’ the way you'd say something holy and the air in my lungs forgets its job.
"She changes her mind weekly." I manage a shrug that costs me everything. "Last Tuesday it was an astronaut."
"She was very specific with this one." He sets the pen down, eyes finding mine with his full attention. "What did you want to be? At her age."
"A doctor, actually." The word exits before the guard does. "My father's pack had a healer—Elena. She let me watch her stitch a warrior's arm when I was five, and I thought that was the most important thing a person could do."
I pick at a thread on my sleeve. "But when my father was killed, everything I wanted got buried under everything I had to survive."
The silence that follows holds weight—dense, careful, like he’s listening with more than his ears.
"Shadowcrest has partnerships with three human medical programs." His voice shifts to the tone he uses for pack logistics—steady, factual. "Pre-med track, accelerated for candidates with field experience…" He meets my eyes. "If you want to pursue it, I'll authorize the funding. Not a favor, a pack investment."
I open my mouth. Close it.
Not rescue. He's telling me he sees what I could become and wants to build a road to it. And that, coming from a man who doesn't remember he's my children’s father, spreading through my chest is too large for the space allotted.
"That's…" My throat works around nothing. "I don't know what to say."
"Say you'll think about it." Leon shrugs like he hasn't just rearranged the architecture of my future in four sentences.
"Then, I'll think about it. Thank you." It came out thicker than planned, mortifying even, so I clear my throat and reach for the reports. "The supply request needs your signature on page three."
He stands to look where I'm pointing, and the atmosphere of the room shifts. Both of us leaning over the desk, my finger on the signature line, his hand braced beside mine. Two inches of charged air between our arms, warmth radiating off his skin without contact.
"Here?" His pen hovers when he turns his head, and our faces are inches apart.
Close enough to see the amber flecks in his irises. The faint scar along his jaw. The exact geography of a mouth I've spent years trying to forget. His eyes drop—to my lips, quick and involuntary—then snap back. I watch it happen in real time.
His jaw tightening first, then the crease between his brows before the frustrated press of his mouth, and finally something darker that carves lines around his eyes. Aimed inward, at whatever keeps dragging him toward a woman he's married against.
I don’t have time to recall the movement before he kisses me.
One moment we’re looking at each other, the next one his hand finds the side of my face and his mouth meets mine with the desperation of a man who just stopped holding his breath.
His lips are warm and firm and the sound that escapes my throat is not one I'll be recovering from in this lifetime. I kiss him back almost unconsciously as my fist closes in his shirt.
For exactly six seconds, that feels simultaneously like a moment and a lifetime, the world is nothing but heat and cedar and the specific devastation of being kissed by someone who doesn't know he's kissing you for the second first time.
Then the freight train of reality and realization arrives.
He's a married man now, my stepsister’s husband, and mere days ago Dylan kissed me. Dylan is safer for me in every way that counts. Nothing about the man whose shirt I'm gripping is survivable.
When I finally had the strength to pull back, Leon’s hand hovered at my jaw for one beat before dropping.
"Shit, I’m sorry. I shouldn't have…" His voice is wrecked, scraped hollow. He drags a hand through his hair and I watch him reassemble the Alpha the way you'd watch someone rebuild a wall while the mortar is still wet. "That can't happen. I don't know why I… It won't happen again, sorry."
His kiss still burns across my mouth and every apology he offers is a nail being hammered into something I'll have to pry out later.
"It's fine." My voice sounds professional and completely unrecognizable. "We should—"
The sound of the footsteps interrupts me. The sharp staccato of heels I'd know in my sleep.
Kailani's walk, the one that sounds like a countdown.
Leon moves behind his desk with the speed of a man who's done this math quicker, while I grab the reports and make it to the door on legs that have no right to be functioning.
"Thank you for the reports." I hear his voice behind me—steady and composed, and absolutely destroyed underneath if you know where to listen.
I have always known where to listen with him.
The hallway is cool and dim. I press my back against the stone wall and tip my head up, my mouth still burning from a kiss that tasted like everything I can't have.
Then my canines ache—sharp, sudden, a flare through my upper jaw that vanishes before I can draw a full breath. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and there's nothing, nothing different, nothing to justify the phantom of teeth that don't exist in a woman born without a wolf.